Reformers to Radicals (32 page)

Exerting collective political power was the goal of a letter-writing campaign targeting the teacher of the Abner's Branch school in Leslie County. As with similar AV projects, the letters followed a certain pattern. All began with proper grammar and correct spelling but closed with a rougher pen and noticeably poor grammar, suggesting that the authors received help. All addressed the same general topics—the terrible physical condition of the school and playground and the fact that the teacher, Ruth Lewis, failed to adequately supervise the students. As for the latter charge, a series of serious accidents had, allegedly, occurred during school hours. Two youngsters had broken arms, and one girl had broken her leg in two places. In each case, the teacher was accused of exercising poor judgment, of not properly supervising the children, and of not reacting appropriately after the injuries occurred. All this could have been avoided, one resident wrote, if the school had a responsible, adequate teacher. This same person claimed that the Leslie County superintendent, Hays Lewis, canceled the state-administered achievement tests “to save embarrassment.” Another resident wrote that, even though he lived in Leslie County, he sent his children to Harlan County schools because “at the Abner Branch School our children aren't watched.” Lewis allowed them to wander up to a half a mile from the
building to play. Further, even though most children earned As and Bs, they still were unprepared for high school. When some of the Abner's Branch residents requested a new teacher, the superintendent's response was “that its in the family and thats as far as we got.”
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Other communities took up the banner of school reform. The people of Buffalo, in Rockcastle County, protested the fact that, as they put it, they had “no actual cooperation from the school board” when they asked for improvements for their school. “Oh yes, we have the seeming cooperation[;] the very syrupy sweet greeting . . . and the perpetual answer ‘we will do all we can,' then nothing.” Moreover, board meetings were “closed as far as we are concerned.” When the protestors finally managed to send a representative to a meeting, the board discussed “things of no interest” to the community and then let the Buffalo delegate know that it was time to leave by refusing to answer his questions.
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As these examples illustrate, by the fall of 1966 the Volunteers experienced, at best, eroding relationships with many eastern Kentucky school superintendents. When Julia McKeon, an educator from the Bronx, New York, asked for help finding a teaching position in eastern Kentucky, the AV staff member Thomas Rhodenbaugh admitted that the Appalachian Volunteers “do not have the best working relationship with many school superintendents.” In fact, they had troubles with nearly every level of local government. In November, Steve Daugherty became enraged when he learned that the postmaster of Evarts had hired his own wife as postal clerk. “We are attempting to fight a War on Poverty,” Daugherty wrote to the regional director of the U.S. Postal Service, “and yet, how successful can we be if even the positions created by the various government agencies are filled only with members of the same family.” Still, the AVs felt that they were achieving some level of success. “Three years ago,” the antipoverty organization announced, “the primary words used to describe the isolated Appalachian Mountaineer were apathetic, unmotivated, uninspiring, culturally deprived, and in some cases even dull. At the present time we are hearing him described as activist, trouble-maker, organized, impatient, frustrated, and in some cases angry. The reason for this change is attributed to [AV and VISTA] Volunteers.” According to the AVs, the catalyst for this change was “
dependable
information which tends to decrease or even eliminate the activity of the
rumor mill
which previously was the primary source of
‘information.'” That is, whereas the organs of local government gave local residents disinformation, thereby keeping them in a subservient position, the Volunteers gave them the knowledge they needed to make informed decisions about the issues affecting their lives.
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Through the remainder of 1966 and into 1967, the Volunteers worked to liberate mountaineers from poverty and subservience. Impoverished rural mountaineers were not unambitious, strange, or quaint, Milton Ogle informed Robert Kennedy. They were “exploited, underdeveloped, and basically bypassed by the progress of the nation as a whole.” Appalachia's problems, Ogle declared, were very similar to those of the “‘third world.'” The people of the region were “weary from exploitation,” and, because they “provided the backbone of the nation's resources,” they “must do whatever it takes to begin to benefit from these resources.” This statement became the battle cry of the Appalachian Volunteers for the next year.
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In order to help the local people of Wise County, Virginia, help themselves, the fieldman Joe Mulloy proposed the creation of a reference book on the political, economic, and social fabric of the county. “This idea,” he explained, “grew out of the lack of information—the lack of [data] that the folks have about what is available and the fact that the . . . service agencies are not doing the job they should.” This volume would allow the mountaineers to discover the “who, what and how of welfare, health and sanitation, coal operations, unions, [and] pensions.” This information was important because rural people needed to know how the system worked “in order to operate within [this] structure and bring about effective change.” It would illustrate the flaws of the existing power structure and make their exploitation more successful. Taking a cue from the civil rights movement and the Highlander Folk School, Mulloy thought that his reference book could become the text for an “Appalachian Freedom School.”
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Mulloy's tactics apparently achieved some success. In a memorandum to the OEO, Tom Rhodenbaugh indicated that the board of directors of the Wise County CAP fired the agency's director, James Sommerville, who was sympathetic to the AV position. Rhodenbaugh claimed that Sommerville did not wish to see the county's CAP turned into yet another “paternalistic” social program and that he supported, with AV help, a group of African American women in the town of Norton who organized a “domestic services corporation” (a laundry service) and a sewing cooperative headquartered
at a CAP-run community center. After the co-op asked the local CAP for additional funding, rumors that the grassroots organization really was an AV-inspired and -led domestic workers' strike circulated throughout the town. In what the Volunteers interpreted as an attempt to keep the people dependent, the majority of the program's board decided that the women then working in the center should be rotated out after only a few months in order to give more people a chance to benefit from the program. Those then working protested the decision, and Sommerville organized their appeal. He claimed that the Volunteers saw the tension between himself and the board as an opportunity to direct the entire county program toward the problems of the poor, and they then approached the board with ideas for additional projects to benefit the impoverished in the county.
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At a meeting on September 29, 1966, the Wise County CAP president announced that there “was an internal force seeking to disrupt [the program] and to subvert its expressed purpose.” In response, the Volunteers issued a “propaganda piece” called “The Wise Owl” that carried the news of the board's earlier decision to close the county's Program Development Office and then “championed [this decision] as a beginning of the end of Appalachia's problems as the poor shouldered arms to wage their own fight.” Following the distribution of this newspaper, the program labeled the AVs “subversives,” and, at the suggestion of the AVs, the poor began to form people's committees. As these committees protested the action of the Wise County CAP, the board relieved Sommerville of his duties as director. Until they could get Sommerville returned to his post, the Volunteers added him to their staff so that the work in the county could continue unabated.
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To the north, in Raleigh County, West Virginia, the Appalachian Volunteers realized their greatest success to date. Here, more than in any other county in which they worked, they demonstrated that “democracy is real and functioning at the grassroots level.” After establishing a people's committee, they succeeded in replacing the local CAP director with Gibbs Kinderman, an AV staff member. Raleigh County, like most of the other counties of southern West Virginia, had a strong union and an organizing tradition, which aided Kinderman in his assent to power in the county CAP. Moreover, the county CAP was inadequately funded and badly run. As a result, official opposition to the Volunteers was weak and poorly organized. In Mingo County, West Virginia, by contrast, after the county CAP director,
Huey Perry, resigned after a losing battle with the local political hierarchy, the Volunteers tried unsuccessfully to “take over” that CAP as well.
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In eastern Kentucky, where the majority of Volunteer activity still took place, the results and consequences were not yet so dramatic. Nevertheless, the AVs did make an impression on many county officials. It was “flap time,” Ogle informed the AV membership. By this, he meant that the Volunteers had gotten “enough community people together and talking that the hair on the backs of some of the more unresponsive ‘public servants' [was] standing on end.” As a consequence, those “public servants” mounted a campaign to discredit the Volunteers in the eyes of the OEO. To counteract this, the Volunteers embarked on their own campaign to bolster their position with the federal government. Ogle asked his fieldmen to gather petitions, letters, and testimonials of community action from mountain folk that could be presented to OEO. “Its important,” Ogle concluded, “that the CAPS begin to realize that the A.V.s are for real and that community organization is part of their job.”
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The AVs did continue organizing in eastern Kentucky. “Appalachian Volunteers and VISTA Volunteers are constantly harassed by public blasts from local politicians who see poor people becoming more knowledgeable and more experienced,” Ogle declared. There was “as a result,” he continued, “a loosening of the grip of the political patronage system on which the poor have been forced to depend. Isolated mountain people are finding that their voices have an important effect on updating and upgrading the social and economic institutions in their localities.”
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According to the AVs, much of this “upgrading” “has been diagnosed by county leaders as ‘agitation' or as a response on the part of isolated poor people to agitation by Vista and Appalachian Volunteers.” Tracing the history of the War on Poverty in Breathitt County, for example, the AVs argued that, in the beginning, the men and women who led the antipoverty agencies “operated on the assumption that the ‘target population' possessed neither organizational or administrative skills nor the gumption to acquire such skills”: “Consequently, involving the poor in the conception, design and implementation of anti-poverty programs has been kept to a minimum.” Because the local administration ignored them, the people along the north fork of the Kentucky River began to hold their own meetings. On May 3, 1966, Buck Maggard, a local resident, called a meeting at Lost Creek
and formed the Breathitt County Grassroots Citizen Committee. According to the AVs, Maggard's motivation for his new organization was his “antagonism for the Community Action Office in [the county seat of] Jackson which he contended was controlled by the power structure.” The AVs themselves argued that the “county has been dominated for forty years by one political family which has virtual control of the county, its resources and its people.” As a result, “misuse of funds, graft, and patronage” were “realities” that the Volunteers needed to address in Breathitt County.
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Operating independently from the local CAP, Maggard's Grassroots Committee and the AVs worked with the poor of Sandy Ridge in neighboring Wolfe County to form a pine roping and Christmas decoration manufacturing cooperative and established a quilting shop in Malaga, also in Wolfe. With Volunteer help, it created community libraries at Barwick, Haddix, Hayes Branch, and a number of other small communities in Breathitt County. As of November 1966, the committee continued, with absolutely no help from the county CAP and little expectation of getting any, to organize the poor around issues that were important to them. By 1967, the Volunteers aided in the establishment of a local chapter of the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People (AGSLP). A somewhat militant anti-strip-mining organization, AGSLP grew out of the actions of Knott County's Mrs. Ollie “Widow” Combs and Dan Gibson in 1965. During the next three years, the AVs worked to form AGSLP chapters in Breathitt, Pike, Floyd, and Harlan counties.
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In addition to the work with AGSLP in Harlan County, the Volunteers founded an outpost at Evarts. Using that outpost as a headquarters, the AVs conducted programs on welfare rights and established an “independent” Head Start–like program that the county school board effectively shut down because of what the Volunteers labeled simply a “contract violation.” Moreover, the AVs sought to develop indigenous local leadership within the county, a project that would make “the future of the A.V.s HELL.” The AV HELL—or Headquarters for Education of Local Leadership—program in Harlan County called for the establishment of a center that would be a gathering place for the poor to think creatively about their problems and possible solutions. At this proposed educational institution, a project somewhat similar to Mulloy's textbook on Wise County politics, would be a library of information about local, state, and federal governments. HELL would also,
the Volunteers hoped, publish a newspaper meant to assist “in educating people about the political scene.” The end result would be a homegrown pressure group that would “make [local] institutions more responsive to the needs of the people.”
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